Underdog: Poems

In Underdog, poet Katrina Roberts considers questions of identity, asking us to meditate on how each of us is "other" — native, immigrant, sojourner, alien — and to examine our at-once shared and foreign frontiers and margins. In boldly inventive poems, she addresses the lives of Chinese immigrants, the appeal of African Dogon tribal lore, the heroics and defeats of artists, canine astronauts, and Mexican farm laborers, to name just a few.

Dramatic and lyrical, her landscapes are faces to be studied and memorized; forgotten and overlooked legends and objects, from this planet and beyond, are retrieved and acknowledged. Her poems present a world that is often unpredictable and inscrutable. All are stitched together with unflinching compassion and a keen desire to bear witness, to comprehend something of the self's relevance in a global context. The poems are elaborate matrices of associations, translations, re-imaginings. They wonder at how individuals through the ages have handled, often with grace, tremendous injustice, and they seek to comprehend the mysteries of our perpetual migrations from and toward each other.

Praise

"Katrina Roberts' poems do not admit easy phrasings; instead, they are assembled word by word, each chosen with informed deliberation and a sense of pace. I have followed the track of her lines with heightened attention, eager for her next surprise." — Billy Collins

"[Friendly Fire] is a gorgeous, amazing book. I've been an admirer of Katrina Roberts’s poems for years and these poems confirm my long-standing affection. Buy this book now." — Sherman Alexie, winner of the National Book Award 2007

"These are words that will not stay still, words rich with themselves and their urgency to move us, not just emotionally but physically. They prod and they poke and they run, making us leap after them. These poems even in their quietest moments are always traveling, always on the move, and we are taken with them, happily, sadly, importantly." — Alberto Ríos, author of Dangerous Shirt

"Katrina Roberts considers the ripples of significance" – Robert Pinsky

"These poems reveal a quick linguistic dexterity as they expose the raw and most sensitive flesh of human earthiness... Expect to linger as you would ... to ponder the miracle of birth." — Joy Harjo, author of She Had Some Horses

"Not all poets can love a world as alternately beautiful and decayed as ours, and not all poems can sustain us with the complex, far-reaching vision and hope we need. But in Katrina Roberts we have a poet who companions herself to hard histories, to ancient proverbs, and to her own family, and finds in each an endurance to save us into the next day's reckoning. Underdog is a book that sees, that sees and goes on in spite of what it consequently discerns—which is, we accept, the only way to stay alive." — Katie Ford, author of Colosseum: Poems

"Katrina Roberts is a poet of wise abundance, spending it all, saving nothing, whose words I trust to mine and mind their ever-generative sources." — Lia Purpura

"In Katrina Roberts' limber hands 'underdog' means heroic, it means comic and incendiary, earthly and ascendant: 'the quotidian marrying the mythic.' I finished this terrific book feeling I'd witnessed countless feats of transformation, countless revelatory assaults on the commonplace. Only a poet this assured and restless could make our ordinary world an enchantment. These are generous, resonating poems." — Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead, winner of the National Book Award.

About the Author

In addition to her newly released Pacific Northwest Poetry #11: Underdog, Katrina Roberts is the author of Friendly Fire, Winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry; How Late Desire Looks, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; and The Quick, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets; Never Before: Poems About First Experiences; Long Journey: Pacific Northwest Poets; and Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. Her poems have been included in journals such as Basalt, New Orleans Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, RUNES, New England Review, Sonora Review, The Journal, and Orion.

A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Roberts is the Mina Schwabacher Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series.

Born on the Jersey shore, Roberts had the opportunity to work with Seamus Heaney in College. She spent the year after college writing on a Briggs Literary Traveling Fellowship, and learning the ways of wine-making in Switzerland, Italy, and France. After a stint on the island of Iowa City (amidst corn and lively conversation), and a decade's run of adjunct teaching in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Extension, Boston University, Holy Cross, Keene State College, University of Southern Maine, Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, etc.), she moved to the Pacific Northwest to teach at Whitman College, and to get some grapevines in the ground.

She and her husband are the winemakers-proprietors for Tytonidae Cellars. Their three small children can generally be found playing with barn cats in the good dirt somewhere not far from the vineyard.

Learn more at http://www.katrinaroberts.net/

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